Read the full article here.
Read the full article here.
“In 50 years’ time, historians will look back on the period between 2015 and 2020 in British politics with bewilderment and astonishment.
For the whole time Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party, the entire media-political establishment turned its anti-racist spotlight remorselessly, relentlessly, not on Israel – a state condemned by all of the world’s leading human rights organisations for its apartheid system – but on its victims and their supporters.”
Read the full review here.
“Britain’s mainstream media, its Army and the Israel lobby all combined to ensure Jeremy Corbyn did not become prime minister, a new book argues.”
Read the full excerpt here.
”A fascinating, fast-paced read – a political thriller narrating the real-life story of an extraordinary and appalling mass hysteria and scam.”
Read the full review here.
“Journalist Asa Winstanley has been one of the most consistent and compelling voices exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam perpetrated against Jeremy Corbyn and the left to prevent a left-wing government – a weaponisation since confirmed even by the Starmer-commissioned Forde Report. In his new book, ‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism’, Winstanley provides a convincing history of the development of the smear before Corbyn was ever in the frame to lead the party – and the way it was used to help bring Corbyn’s leadership down after the left terrified the Establishment by coming close to winning the 2017 general election.”
Read the full article here.
“In this compilation available from OR Books, Jamie Stern-Weiner has drawn together an incomparable selection of contributors to debate key questions concerning Israel-Palestine from the perspective of those committed to justice and national liberation.”
Read the full article here.
Asa Winstanley talks about his forthcoming book, publishing 30th May 2023.
Watch the full interview here.
“Of course, direct action is nothing new. Indeed it is a longstanding tool for bringing about social change. Apartheid, equal rights for women and basic health and safety laws were all won by decades of collective action taken by workers, women and people of colour. They combined protests and traditional political campaigning with an array of direct action techniques — including, in the last resort, recourse to hunger and general strikes.
Many of the steps taken by campaigners today draw on the past for inspiration. Emily Davison and dozens of suffragettes were forcibly fed in prison for going on hunger strikes before she tragically threw herself in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913.”
Read the full article here.
“On March 27, 40 men were killed in a fire at a migrant detention centre in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The victims hailed from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela.
Like so many thousands of refuge seekers from around the world, they had been jailed in Mexico for the crime of aspiring to a better life in the United States – which forces its southern neighbour to act as deputy gatekeeper and migrant antagonist.”
Read the full article here.
For 50 years Medea Benjamin has been an activist, sticking her nose everywhere it’s not wanted — straight into the authoritarian, militaristic business of American empire. And where she was once welcome on that most “liberal” of cable news outlets, MSNBC, since becoming a thorn in the side of Democratic administrations as well as Republican, she’s no longer welcome to grace their airwaves.
Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss with Benjamin her initiation into the world of social justice and the many struggles she’s been a part of since.
Watch the full interview here.
“Worshippers in Al Aqsa attacked, Gaza bombed again. But the Western media still equates the neck and the guillotine.”
Read the full article here.
“Rather than presenting the intersection of cars, jails, debt, and surveillance as a distinct movement that we must find the energy and time to add to our list, the book presents “mobility justice” as a site that connects movements and deepens our understanding of how power works across intersecting forms of extraction and oppression. Another part of the magic of this study—and what makes it a pleasure to read—is the way it balances its rigorous analysis with the human stories that connect the conceptual dots.”
Read the full article here.
”Two recent cancellations of a book talk by anti-war activist Medea Benjamin raise questions about free speech in a time of war.”
Read the full article here.
In this week’s episode of Terra Verde, host Gary Graham Hughes talks with Cascadia Times investigative journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate about their new book, Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, which celebrates the beauty and complexity of these ecosystems and uncovers how climate policy mechanisms that favor extractive industry are contributing to the ongoing degradation of this amazing rainforest.
Listen to the full episode here.
“In the American popular imagination, the car is a symbol of freedom. But in reality, for many, it can actually be a trap.
That’s one takeaway of “Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality,” a book by Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross, professors at New York University (OR Books, November, 2022). The two, who work in a research lab at NYU with formerly incarcerated students, trace the pathways that lead Americans from cars to jails and from jails to cars and back again.”
Read the full interview here.
“As the third anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic passes us by, the Biden administration is seeking to declare an end to the federal public health emergency, along with policies and benefits that provide protection and support for working people who kept the economy open and running during a planetary health crisis. In doing so, the president is leaving the states responsible for addressing gaps and protecting workers.”
Read the full review here.
The invasion of Iraq 20 years ago casts a long shadow over today’s neocon attempts to stir up World War III, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.
“The US record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine.
Yet the US never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere.”
Read the full article here.
“Fernández possesses considerable literary gifts, but this book probably won’t get much mainstream attention. Even as discussion of domestic racism and economic inequality has gone mainstream, even after decades of US war crimes all across the globe, anti-imperialist analysis remains muted, even stigmatized. But if an engaging narrator and lively prose could help change that, Fernández would be that narrator and Inside Siglo XXI would be that book.”
Read the full review here.
“FOR MANY AMERICANS, it is easier to acquire a new car than to find a rental apartment they can afford. But there is a high price, in sheer debt, to pay for getting that ride on the road. The average monthly loan payment for a new vehicle recently passed the $700 mark, a figure that does not include insurance and the steep costs of maintenance. Currently, Americans owe 1.52 trillion dollars in auto debt—a staggering sum that has doubled over the last decade, due in large part to the migration of subprime loans from the housing to the auto market.”
Read the full article here.
“The background to the war has recently been well-summarized in Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies’ book, “War in Ukraine; Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict” and in Benjamin Abelow’s “How the West Brought War to Ukraine”.”
Read the full article here.
“In CARS AND JAILS, New York-based professors of Social and Cultural Analysis Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross build on this theme, devastatingly undermining the mythology of automobiles as “freedom machines” and foregrounding the irony of tropes like the Buick “Free Spirit”. The book exposes the grim contrast between images of freedom and the reality of a society in which decaying or non-existent public transport creates auto-necessity that drags working people deeper into debt and, especially for people of colour, exposes them to the hazards of pretextual police traffic stops for “driving while Black”.”
Read the full review here.
On the anniversary of Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine, the media coverage of this war reaffirms the old adage that the first casualty of war is the truth. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies argue that renewed peace talks, not escalatory arms shipments, are crucial to end the bloodshed.
Read the full article here.
“The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate—all sacrificed to the God of War.”
Read the full article here.
“Between 2017 and November 2022, 730 people were killed by police during these incidents. More than once a week during that time, someone not being pursued or investigated for a violent crime met their death after a traffic stop. An alarming number were stopped on the pretext of any one of a hundred or more petty traffic code violations.
How did police achieve the power, and impunity, to stop motorists seemingly at will?”
Read the full article here.
“Brief, judicious and well-written, this is an excellent primer for western peace activists or anyone else concerned about ending the carnage in Ukraine.”
Read the full review here.
“We need a public alternative which can be democratically controlled… so that we can be guaranteed that it’s a just transition which saves not just frontline communities but also the working class, more broadly.”
Watch the full interview here.
Listen to the full interview here.
Watch the full interview here.
“Mike Davis is the most consequential writer and thinker on Los Angeles since… perhaps ever. But his work roams far beyond Los Angeles, including popular and scholarly work on environmentalism, Marxist theory, urbanism and public health. He is also conversant in ‘hard’ sciences like geology, and can read specialized literature in fire science and climatology. Over the years he’s blurred the lines between these disparate fields. He braids them together with an indefatigable faith in a revolutionary project: nothing less than the liberation of humanity from human exploitation, which today also requires the end of humanity’s malevolent exploitation of the natural world.
His faith in revolution is historically situated, pointing toward a string of moments in which ‘utopian’ visions have flourished in the here and now, before crumbling under the weight of counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions, only to be taken up again. There have been large-scale experiments such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Republic, and countless small-scale ones, like Christian Base Communities in 1980s rural Central America. Mike tells us that the future must be ‘excavated in the past,’ rescued from under the ruins of reaction…
At the core of Mike’s work is how he values the dignity of life itself — lived as equitable, healthy, sustainable. And not just human life. He identifies class struggle as the primary engine of modern human history, and he is also an environmentalist because capitalist exploitation violates not only the bodies of workers but the Earth itself.”
Read the full article here.